


Contradance

by ivorygates, synecdochic



Series: the cammieverse [10]
Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-07-31
Updated: 2008-07-31
Packaged: 2018-05-31 00:37:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,955
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6448531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ivorygates/pseuds/ivorygates, https://archiveofourown.org/users/synecdochic/pseuds/synecdochic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cammie will usually tell you they've been fucking.  Daniel, for preference, won't say anything at all.</p><p>(For those of you just tuning in, this is the universe in which Cam is and always has been a girl.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Contradance

**Author's Note:**

> This story comes after Synecdochic's Cammie'verse stories. She finally got them into bed: this is what comes after about a year of happily ever after.

They've been living together for three years, seven months, one week, and three days (tell the truth and shame the Devil) and depending which of them you ask, and when and where you ask it, they've been having sex, making love, or _fucking_ for eight months, two weeks, and four days. Cammie (Lieutenant Colonel Cameron Mitchell, USAF, for a good part of those almost three years, but for not all of them, because she leaves the rank at the Mountain whenever she possibly can) will usually tell you they've been fucking. Daniel, for preference, won't say anything at all.

It isn't, Cammie knows, that he's ashamed of her, or of them. In fact, he's fiercely proud. Of her, and to _be_ hers, and the fact that the man is as possessive as a yard-dog with a soup-bone isn't really a problem, because he isn't possessive in the bad way (and oh, she's seen plenty enough of the bad way, watching Sam make all her mistakes and levering her out of more than some.) He'll let her go off and get killed eight days out of seven, so long as she never falls in love with somebody else.

She doesn't want anyone else and she never will.

It took her from Monday to Friday of her first week at the SGC to fall in love with him in the completely and forever way. It took him one year, ten months, two weeks, and six days more than that to reach the place where she could say so. She's not exactly sure when along the way he fell in love back. Neither is he. There are a few things they still don't talk about: she knew, going in (falling in love with Daniel was like going to war, she knew that from the start) that he had scars and capital-I Issues; nobody who'd been on a Gate Team for eight years couldn't. She has one or two herself. They work around them. That doesn't mean she intends to leave him the way she found him. It wouldn't be fair to him.

She knows (has known from the first time she _finally_ managed to drag him into bed) that S-E-X has always been pretty low on his list of priorities. It's not so much that he's repressed as that for as long as she's known him he's been trying to do four peoples' work and invent the 40-hour day. And something she knew without having to be told by anyone was that Daniel simply wasn't going to _bother_ unless he was emotionally-involved. And he hadn't wanted to get emotionally-involved with anyone (no, not even with her) for fear they'd be _taken away._ She never tried to argue him out of that one. He'd had too much proof it was true. She'd just done her best to outwait it.

But now that she's got him where they both want to be, she's got to try to convince him to let her do all the things she's been saving up all this time. She knows he wants them (wants her to do them) but somewhere in his past somebody stuffed his poor little head full of all that good-guy straight-boy "must concentrate on her" thing, so it doesn't matter that _her_ would like nothing better than to spend the entire afternoon sucking on his cock, he gets all twitchy and fussed about being time and trouble to her (as if he _hadn't_ been the most high-maintenance undertaking on the planet long before the first time she ever managed to get his pants down around his knees and suck him off.) It's sweet. When it isn't driving her _absolutely crazy._

He knows she'll never lie to him. Not ever, not about anything, not when it would make The Job easier, not when it would make her _life_ easier, not when it would make his life a lot less humiliating. She may flat refuse to tell him something (sometimes at the top of her lungs), but she will never, _ever_ lie to Daniel. The first thing she learned about him (even before she loved him, even before she fell _in_ love with him, because she suspects loving him came first, even if only by a few minutes) was that he didn't give his trust quickly or easily, and that even after you had his trust, you might not have his belief. Because he trusts her now, but he doesn't quite believe her when she tells him how hot it makes her to get him off, how much pleasure it gives her just to love on him.

He's not really comfortable with being done _for_ , even when she says it's just taking turns and he's just getting his turn first. He'll do for _her_ eagerly, and while nobody would ever call him an insatiable sex-god (although she did, once, just to see Samantha Eileen snort iced tea out her nose), he's generous and happy and enthusiastic about all the things they do _together._ And it's greedy of her to want more than sex in the kitchen and on the kitchen table and on the living room couch and the living room rug and up against the front door and in the shower and wet and slippery in the bathtub and in the bed and in every conceivable position that two healthy people who are (most of the time) not suffering from broken bones, gunshot wounds, knife wounds, radiation burns, and other hazards of their job can get into. And she still does. Nobody ever accused her of being _reasonable._

It takes her a while to coax him into it. About three months, in fact - from veiled hints, to passing remarks, to outright statements that he doesn't have to respond to immediately, to discussing doing it 'sometime' (which is his tacit agreement), to setting a date (to breaking that date because they happen to be stuck offworld in the middle of a Jaffa Civil War), but the time finally comes, eight months, two weeks, and four days after she first took him to bed (they started fucking; they made love for the first time) that Daniel agrees that for their next forty-eight hours of downtime, he will do _anything she wants_ in bed.

She knows his codes by now. 'In bed' doesn't mean _in bed._ It means in a sex way. And she knows how his mind works, pretty much, so she's pretty sure that what he's imagining is that she's going to want him to spend the entire weekend naked and having lots of sex, and he's probably figuring that he'll be the one doing for her. But that isn't what she has in mind. He's promised to do what she wants. What she wants is to show him something she's always known and that she knows he's never understood. That it's not about what they do, really, when they're all naked and sweaty and making each other feel really good. It's about the meaning behind it. And about the fact that the more trust there is in bed, the more fun two people can have, and she loves Daniel. Down deep inside, in a place she doesn't let him see, it hurts her to see him holding back the way he does. Not because she's feeling hurt that he doesn't trust her, but because she's feeling sorry (for him) that he can't trust anyone; because she knows in her heart that she's the person he'd trust if he could figure out how, and she's determined to show him the way.

#

He isn't precisely suspicious of her that Saturday morning. It's more in the nature of 'waiting for the other shoe to drop,' and she points out that he's promised to do what pleases her with no strings attached until Monday morning. They wrangle amiably about the precise terms of what he agreed to while she fills him up with waffles with maple syrup and Danish butter and sausage and bacon and coffee and fresh-squeezed orange juice and fresh fruit with Grand Marnier sauce. And if she were planning on a morning (afternoon, actually, by the time he's up and properly fed) of Olympic-style sex, that kind of start would be a bad idea, but Cammie's momma did not drop her on her _head_ as a baby, and she knows exactly where she's going with this. He's already half-drowsy by the time she's loading the dishwasher, and it's easy enough to kiss him into compliance and lead him back into the bedroom. He's amused, curious, relaxed. Just the way she wants him.

He climbs back into bed. She ducks into the bathroom to make a couple of quick preparations for later. The water here runs hotter than the hinges of hell, so it will warm up the contents of the bowl nicely. She fills the bowl, drops in the bottles - one from the medicine cabinet, the sesame massage oil, one from the drawer (he never goes in there; it's all her stuff and may have Girl Cooties) - carries the steaming bowl carefully back to the bed, and tucks it under the side where neither of them will kick it even if they get up.

"What's that?" he asks, lifting up on one elbow.

"Warming up the massage oil," she says, her voice muffled (she's in the middle of pulling off her t-shirt, because frying bacon is no respecter of a casual nudity policy and only an idiot frys-up naked.) And she is, and if that isn't the only thing she's warming up, well, full disclosure can come later, because he's promised he'll do anything she wants this weekend, but by the same token, she won't take that as a license to do something to him he hates. She knows that there always have been, always will be (yes, oh Lord, will be even if they live to grow old and grey together) three of them together in their bed every time they fuck, and Daniel refuses to admit it, and she will not be a goddamned bigamist. She'll sleep with Daniel's issues, but she won't fuck them. Or fuck them over.

He lies back, watching appreciatively (if a bit blurrily without his glasses) as she finishes getting naked. Life would be much easier for both of them, she thinks, if the issues were explicit, of course. But ... they aren't, and she knows better than to push. Most of the time. There were one or two occasions - back a few months after the beginning - involving Daniel out of the bed with his back up against the wall and her in their bed having _no idea what had just happened_ where she did say to him, as gently as she could manage, "Baby, I need to know what I did so I don't do it again." And he hadn't been able to tell her. He'd wanted to. He'd trusted her enough to try. But so much of it (what was wrong and why it was wrong) was lost, or buried, and the tripwires led a great distance off through broken country - here there be dragons, and snakes, and alien machines, and robots, and plagues; death and unChristian resurrection - and she couldn't reconstruct the map of that territory any more than he could. Ease and practice and familiarity (and the fact that she hasn't, oh, _gone and died_ ) have denatured many of those goblins, but Cammie isn't stupid enough to think there aren't a few mines left in the minefield. She'd really like what she hopes to do today not to be one of those things, though. Daniel's body spread out beneath her, strong and warm and hers to touch in every way she wants, hers to give pleasure to _(feeling him surrender himself to her completely, accepting everything she can give him)_ is an image that makes her dizzy with _want._

When she's naked she slides beneath the covers. Daniel craves touch and contact and physical intimacy more than any man she's ever known, but he'll rarely touch her first, and she can just about number the times he's touched her casually in public on her fingers and have fingers left over (she knows why, too, and doesn't make it into anything it isn't.) She slides her arms around him and he murmurs happily and wraps himself around her, going immediately for what she thinks may be his favorite place on her body; the soft skin of her neck just above her collarbone. (It's either that or she's got 'Start Here' stenciled on her there in letters only he can read.)

"You smell good," he announces after a moment, and she laughs.

"Daniel Jackson, you would say that if I smelled like a wet horse." She has a certain justice on her side, considering the times and circumstances (some not involving a recent shower on her part) on which he's made an identical pronouncement.

"A very _nice_ wet horse," he offers confidently, regarding her, and the only thing to do with a man who has just compared you to a wet horse is to kiss him until he can't breathe.

He thinks he knows where they're headed next, but he doesn't. This weekend is for _her_ , so they're going to do what _she_ likes, and they're starting off with something that she _knows_ that Daniel likes too, and their only problem with it is that he thinks she shouldn't like it, because women aren't supposed to like sucking cock. (She said to him once: "Daniel, babydoll, if it wasn't so much fun, do you think so many _men_ would spend so much time doing it?") She never got a really useful answer out of him, but she knows he thinks it's Demeaning To Women (so does Sam), although if she backed him into a corner and made him be honest, it wouldn't really be about the cocksucking, but about the doing _for_ again, and the paralyzing thought that he might be making her do something she didn't want to be doing. (As if she couldn't stop him cold with _one single sentence._ )

So she rolls him onto his back - and he's already more than half-hard - but when he reaches for her she starts slithering down his torso, nipping at his chest and belly as she goes.

"Oh, hey," he says (right on schedule) and there's that worried note in his voice, and a couple of years from now might be the time for them to have the conversation about the hidden heritage of the White Colonial Paternalistic Mindset as it applies to gender relations, but right now all she does is nip just a little harder just below the navel (where despite rigorous physical training there's a touch of softness that Cammie finds endearing and Daniel pretends isn't there) and says, "You hush up and let me enjoy myself here."

He's entirely too tense for somebody who's about to be blown within an inch of his life, but she's used to that. It's frustrating, but it's his tangled-up way of showing care. She's written enough Mission Reports of her own by now to know what doesn't make it into them, and a good chunk of SG-1's missions before her time were never written up at all; no way to know all the things that have happened, and not just to him (those aren't the worst sometimes) but to people he cares about (and yeah, a lot of 'em'd be Sam) and him not able to stop them. So long as she doesn't reflect his tension back at him and gets on with what she's doing, he'll settle right down (a lesson she learned long before she ever met him, through not necessarily in the context of a good blowjob.) She wraps her hand around his cock, slides the foreskin back, brushes her lips back and forth over the head. "You don't quit your squirming around I'm gonna bite," she says mock-sternly. There's a soft chuff of laughter from the head of the bed, and he ostentatiously relaxes.

The old saying about 'balls' and 'hearts' and 'minds' is pretty much true (Gran'ma actually did it up as a sampler, all over with her best needlepoint roses; it hangs in the bedroom Momma usually makes sure goes to any guests from Yankeeland who come to visit), although Cammie's already got Daniel's heart and she wants his mind to _go away_ for just a little while, but when she's got one hand wrapped around his balls and the other hand bracing his dick the way she wants it, she can finally relax and enjoy herself, because Daniel isn't going anywhere and neither is she. (They've been working their way from 'trust' toward 'belief' for a while, and she's told him time and again how much she loves doing this; the thick weight on her tongue, in her mouth, the taste and the feel and the way he smells, and all the little sounds he makes when he isn't quite noticing, and she knows not only that she's damned good at it, but that when he stops obsessing about _exploiting_ her, he loves having it done to him.)

She knows they've gotten a little closer to where she wants them to be when he reaches down to rest his hand on her shoulder, just to touch, and to stroke a little, friendly-like, and when he shifts around on the sheets to settle himself more comfortably, and sighs out, all relaxed (won't last, but it's a start.)

There's as many different ways to suck cock as there are recipes for Red Velvet Cake (and like with the recipe, some of them are _just wrong_ and some are just variations) and it pretty much settles out to whether you're aiming for 'speed' or 'endurance', and the endurance she's thinking of isn't hers, but his (whoever 'he' might have been at various times in her life), because any woman can outlast any man, but the real trick, Cousin Belinda told her once (when Cammie was still young enough that the hearing of it made her blush) was making a man _last._ And there've been times and places when it's been all about the speed, and she's no slouch there, but the high art of the blowjob (and in her mind she can hear Sam choking and sputtering even now) lies in _making it last._

And Daniel knows that today (and tomorrow) is for her, whatever she wants (no matter how inexplicable) so he isn't trying to hustle her along, or suggest that maybe they ought to be fucking instead (although that's less his way than to want it to be _her_ turn before his turn is over and if she didn't already know that his mind is wrapped up in logic-tight compartments she'd ask him how he could like eating her out so much and still think she didn't love to go down on him.) They've been fucking for long enough (and she's been doing _this_ too: ninja-attacks in the morning shower, where she gets him up and gets him off and kisses him 'good morning' and nary a bobble in a tight weekday schedule; long lazy afternoons on the couch where he swore he was reading and she swore she was watching the game and neither of them was) that she knows his body well enough (that he trusts her enough) so she can take him right to the edge and keep him there, until she knows that there isn't one damned thing on his mind but coming. Well, maybe that and what might be a commentary on her parentage and probable fate in several Middle Eastern languages (which she finds rather endearing, considering how prim his language is on nearly every other occasion.)

When she knows she's got his complete attention (or none of it, depending on how you think of it) she pops a finger into the side of her mouth, slicking it up with spit. It only takes a second, and he isn't paying her any nevermind anyway. Then she swallows him down deep and slides her fingertip back behind his balls, down between his asscheeks. It won't be a sure tell, but it should give her at least a hint.

He pushes down against her touch, even when she adds a second finger pressing up at him with the pads. She's sure that at just this minute he has no idea of what he's doing, but that's the point: that he hasn't been shocked out of his comfort zone enough to notice. She knows by now what hitting one of his tripwires is like (and pray Jesus they never do again especially in bed; she'll happily infuriate him for business or pleasure but terrifying him is something else entirely) and she knows she hasn't.

There's a warm wet ache of _want_ between her legs; she's so wet that when she hugs her thighs together hard she can feel the stickiness all over her cunt. She can tell him, she can show him, she can suck him off and then take his hand and put it between her legs, and he still never quite believes how much of a turn-on sucking cock is for her. And she's been doing him for almost two hours; it would barely take a stroke or two to send her over now.

But that's not what she wants today.

Sex isn't about bodies, even if that's what the Good Lord gave you to do it with (because Cammie's damned sure there's sex in Heaven, and ain't nobody got bodies there.) Sex is about minds. If it doesn't happen there first, you can bang on the body till Doomsday and ain't nobody home. Hell, she knows Daniel thinks the same thing, he just uses different words for it, not wanting to fuck anybody he doesn't love (and she could have avoided a lot of tears and heartburning if she'd never said 'fuck' to him in the first place, but that's spilled milk now.) The thing she has in her mind has her all filled up with a wanting so fierce that it's making her breath hitch and her cheeks burn, and she slips her hand all the way under his ass, thinking love-words at him now as she strokes her thumbnail up from the base of his cock in one quick merciless gesture, sucking hard, lifting him, urging his hips upward to slide his cock further down her throat as he comes.

It took a long time for her to heat him up, and she takes her time with finishing him, sucking on him and rolling him in her mouth until he's gone all the way soft again. Men are just like women, really. Some can't stand any touching as soon as they come, some want touching for a long time after. He loves to be played with after, if she can just get him to _hold still_ for it. (It's also a reliable way of putting him to sleep if he's wired and exhausted and being a fucking pain in the ass because he's too damned tired to just get his head down and _get some rest_ and while it's not a method she'll deploy that often for so many reasons, still, it works.)

His breathing has slowed all the way to slow normal by the time she gives his dick one last lick and kiss and uncoils herself to stretch out on top of him. He gives her a slow sleepy smile and tells her that her breasts are like twin she-goats. She's pretty sure that's what that phrase means, anyway. He tilts his chin back a fraction (body language meaning _I am too wiped out to move but I want to kiss you_ ) and she licks her lips and lowers her face to his.

One of the many things that makes her love Daniel even more (and it's good that she's got such a long list, because there's also a fairly long list of things about him that make her want to _nail his balls to the nearest tree_ ) is that she might have just had her mouth around his _dick_ and been sucking and swallowing, but he's still sloppy-eager to kiss her all wet and happy and stick his tongue in her mouth and lick everything he can reach without worrying he's suddenly going to be either poisoned or struck gay (yeah, Sam's gonna charge her with attempted murder one of these days, but Sam also really ought to know better than to be drinking beer when Cammie's rating one of her dates.) She'd always figured that any guy who wouldn't kiss her on the mouth after she'd blown him didn't get a second helping of either the kisses or the cocksucking, and it had been a hard-and-fast rule in the Cameron Mitchell Date Book until Daniel, and she'd known she'd break it for him, and turned out she'd never had to.

"What are we going to do now?" he asks, nuzzling her cheek, and there's just a touch of complacency in his voice. Well-fed, well-loved, and well-laid; he's ahead on points (in the eternal tally-board she thinks they all must keep in their heads) and she doesn't begrudge him that in the least. At least he isn't thinking of what he ought to be doing for her. She knows he'll do whatever she wants to do - touch her up, or go down on her, and he'll probably even be hard again in an hour or so. But none of those things is what she wants.

 _"You_ are going to turn over," she says, giving him one last kiss and then pushing up off him straight-armed. "I'm giving you a massage. We'll go on from there."

"Mm'm." He rolls over with a grunt and settles himself, face-down, head pillowed on his forearms. She reaches over the side of the bed to get both the bottles she tucked down there to warm and opens the sesame oil (they both like it; it's light, neutral, as non-messy as something that's oil can be, and - when you come down to it - edible.) The bottles are nicely warm. _"Where_ will we go?" he asks, and his voice is still soft and sandbagged, but she knows every inflection of his voice only slightly-less-well than her own heartbeat. This is the one that's six steps from contemplating balking, when he's decided that there's a situation about which it would be good to have more information. Depending on what he hears, you can end up with kittens and rainbows or Storm Force Ten.

She stretches herself out over his back, shifting her hips against him as if she could fuck him right here and right now. The only reaction she gets is him lifting his hips at her a little, but he nearly always presses back against her when she's touching him. She rubs her forehead against his hair then sticks out her tongue to lick delicately along the shell of his ear. He snorts faintly, announcing wordlessly that it tickles. She leans further over, using her teeth now, nipping delicately at the shell of his ear, her words carried on the barest breath of whisper.

"Wanna ask you to do something for me, baby mine. Wanna try somethin' I been wantin' for a long time. Lemme touch you. Lemme make you feel so good. But you gotta promise to stay put an' don't move."

Words have meanings. Words have _specific_ meanings. Of course Cammie knows how to talk about things without talking about them. She's in the military. (And she's from the South, where people have entire conversations that couldn't be condensed into a three volume novel in the space of one lifted eyebrow.) The difficulty has always been that she lacks the Daniel Jackson Codebook, so it's hard to have one of those conversations that everybody can deny having had afterward with him, because the two of them can't agree on a set of working definitions. (It's also hard to be either subtle or explicit about some things; maybe in a few more years.) She lowers her face and kisses his shoulder, and she can _feel_ him trying to decode a set of sentences whose implicit meaning would have been patently obvious to any of the Buncombe County boys she ran with as a girl.

"Yes-s-s," he says, and the word is drawn-out enough that she can hear the bafflement in his voice. (He'll have caught the hint that it must be something exotic, understood the flat statement that it's something she's wanted for a long time.) She kisses the back of his neck, strokes her hand down over his shoulder, touching with love. Agreement to begin isn't agreement to go on. But it's a beginning. She knows he isn't completely comfortable with even this (the idea of receiving instead of giving), but he's willing to go along with it. Because he loves her. Because he wants to please her.

She sits up, sliding down to settle herself on his ass where she can rest her full weight for a moment or two without any worry about strain or injury. She reaches for the bottle of oil and oils up her hands, leans forward and just begins by touching him. She loves to do this, and never gets to do enough of it. Hands over his shoulders, down his arms to his elbows, down over his back, stroking gently and firmly.

Tie him up, shoot him up with babble juice until he doesn't know his own name and then ask him to describe her, and Cammie knows perfectly well that Daniel will describe someone blonde (she isn't) delicate (hardly) and about the size of Katy Liu, one of the linguists in his department who barely comes up to Cammie's tits (and who has a red belt in Aikido guaran-damn-teeing that she can dismantle full-sized Marines with her little finger, which is completely beside the point). When in fact Cammie's hair is brown, her build is strapping, and in BDUs with her combat boots on (dressed to kill, and sue her for her lack of political correctitude, but that joke will _never not be funny_ ) she can look him in the eye. Their hands are pretty much the same size, too (so much for 'small' and 'delicate'), though she's never gotten any complaints on the occasions when he actually lets her get her hands on him and go to work on those perpetually-knotted neck and back muscles. Today she's not so much minded to unkink all those buried knots (he's pretty loose right now, anyway) as to just lull him, and to that end, she keeps up a soothing flow of nonsense love-talk as she strokes him. It's a mental teething-ring as much as anything, but she knows by now that he needs that; if she isn't giving his mind something to chew on it'll just get itself into trouble.

Every once in a while she'll interrupt herself to kiss whatever is in easy reach, then lick the taste of sesame off her lips and go on talking. "-so beautiful, baby, you're so damn beautiful, God, I love your body, just like this." It's the truth. She does. His body is warm and relaxed and gleaming faintly with its coat of oil; she knows he's bemused at the idea that her concept of ultimate self-indulgence is massaging _him_ , but the process itself is soothing, and familiar, and very, very pleasant (for both of them.) She's coaxed colicky babies to sleep and she's coaxed wounded soldiers to sleep with no more than talking, and while she can't do that with Daniel, she can lull him almost all the way there. She slowly works her way down his body, stroking and kissing and adding more warm oil as needed. The bedroom is warm enough for him to be comfortable lying naked on top of the sheets; by the time she slides herself down between his knees she can feel that he's starting to relax (for real, completely, all the way deep down, in a way he rarely is even when he's sound asleep), and the way he's shifting himself as she palms his glutes, stroking her thumbs up firmly from the crease at the top of his thighs so she doesn't tickle, she can tell that somewhere in the back of his mind, somewhere down where he probably hasn't even noticed it yet, there's the notion that sex again sometime today might not be a bad idea. She leans forward to plant a kiss right at the base of his spine, interrupting her flow of words once more.

"Wanna do you, baby mine," she whispers, reaching now for the other bottle. She squeezes a thick dollop of lube onto her fingers and tilts her hand, letting it ooze down toward the tips of her fingers. She places her fingers at the tip of his tailbone, letting the gel flow gently down into the cleft between his asscheeks. "Wanna love you, make you feel so good…" She stretches herself out over his back, stroking the fingers of her other hand through his hair. "You're so beautiful, you know," she says. "Love you so much. Love you."

He's slick with the lube she's poured onto him; her fingers slide easily, pushing firmly into the crease, down to his balls, back up. He shifts, only a flexing of muscles, a little uncomfortable (shy of it, really) at this unfamiliar touching, but he isn't protesting.

She has to clamp her bottom lip between her teeth - hard - to stifle a groan as she slides a finger inside him. He's hot and tight and slick and she's as breathlessly dizzy as if she's the one being fucked.

When she can manage to take a full breath she tells him that she loves him, that she will always love him, no matter what he wants to do or not do with her, and that she never wants to do anything he doesn't want to do. And as she's speaking (low breathy words in his ear, inaudible from inches away) she's moving her finger just slightly, rocking it in and out just a little, as she coats her finger and his flesh with lube.

And she can see that his eyebrows are drawn together in a thinky way, but none of the muscles against her skin are tense, and after a moment he tucks his chin further down against his shoulder (settling himself) and breathes out. She turns her head to kiss him just behind the ear, where the skin is soft and vulnerable.

#

It's nothing more than the habit of contrariness (or in Jack-speak, being pig-stubborn) that makes him first pretend not to notice the hints, then to temporize, when Cammie suggests he give himself over into her hands for a weekend. He loves her and he wants to make her happy: this is an absolute truth of his existence. That he doesn't understand what makes her happy (or more accurately, why what he knows makes her happy does) is equally true. But after three and a half years, he understands practically everything else about her, so Daniel knows that while a weekend spent doing whatever she wants to do in bed (her terms; though to define the bargain in that fashion makes it seem more adversarial than it is) will certainly amount to a weekend lost to work; he can’t imagine anything she'd want to do that he wouldn't be willing to do with her, or for her, or to her.

It's something of a surprise, though, that what Cammie apparently wants to do is him.

By the time she says so _('wanna do you, baby mine; wanna love you, make you feel so good…')_ her whispered voice husky and slurred with the elisions of comfort and arousal, he doesn't actually care. In the sense of objecting. She's been doing her best to reduce him to an insensible mass of endorphins for the entire morning, and he knows he isn't thinking clearly. He doesn't have to make the effort to try, either; not in his own bed, not with Cammie. This whole weekend is hers. All for her.

He watches a vagrant thought slide across the surface of his mind like a paper streamer blown by the wind _(I wonder what the hell she's got in mind)_ and lets it go. He doesn't care. What she's doing feels good _(fingers sliding in and out of him with slow exquisite care.)_ It feels damned good, in fact - so good that he feels the tempo of his breathing change, and the sound of her voice _(breath spilling hot and wicked against his skin),_ and the touch of her fingers _(as they slide hot and wicked inside his body),_ and the warm weight of her body bearing him down, and the familiar scent of her _(salt and sesame and woman)_ all combine, each demanding the attention of his senses until there's no room for anything else. He'd thought he was relaxed before, but in the back of his mind, like some demented speechwriter, the internal monologue that never _(never)_ shuts up _(ever)_ went babbling on _(if it only spoke of Michelangelo that would be a blessing, but it doesn't.)_

And now that little voice falters, stammers, stutters, loses its place in the eternally-parsed Cliff's Notes of his life and then _shuts the fuck up._

It's silence like a winter morning after a heavy snowfall, or the realization that somebody's car alarm has finally stopped after two interminable hours, and it's so much of a _relief_ (the silence) that he moans softly in pleasure, closing his eyes (he hadn't realized they were open) and feels muscles that he hadn't known were flexed relax and uncoil.

And oh, the sound Cammie makes in response shouldn't be as hot as it is (but it is.) He doesn't know quite what hearing it makes him want. He's never felt this way before, even with her. He wants to give himself over to her completely (no limits, no reservations.) He isn't thinking about why it's a good idea, or why it isn't a bad idea, or thinking about the whole history of the idea (the mental lectern is untenanted for the moment.) He simply _wants._ And what he wants is what _she_ wants, too, because she's stroking his skin, rubbing against him with her body, whispering sweetly-filthy things in his ear, against his skin, and he _knows_ her body by now (as well as she knows his); he knows how her voice trembles when she's aroused, the catch and burr it only gets when she's on the edge of coming.

Knowing that is (as always) hotter than anything else she could do to him, or that he could think of doing, and he can't manage to keep still. There would have been a time (once) when he would have forced himself to, to give nothing away, no matter the cost, but he won't do that to Cammie (not now, not for a long time.)

He pushes back against her fingers and she says: "Oh, God, baby, yeah," her whisper breaking into voice, and her voice is naked: naked eroticism, naked lust, naked love. "C'mon, baby," she urges, and she moves her fingers against him, in him. "C'mon, baby, I wanna see you move for me."

His thoughts are reduced to the elemental equation: what Cammie wants is what he wants. He pushes his hips back against her (against her fingers, onto her fingers) and he can feel _every inch_ of his skin now. Where it's pressing against her. Where it's rubbing against the sheets. He hears himself groan, and he doesn't care. He wants more of this.

She lifts up enough to add more … it's something thicker than the massage oil, but he really doesn't care; whatever it is, it's wet and messy and perfect. She's making love to him long and slow with deep and undemanding strokes, and he can't hear her breathing because it's synchronized with his. His world is narrowed down to the simple touchpoints of everywhere their bodies are touching, and when he pushes back against her fingers she rocks her hips against him, just as if she could penetrate him with her body in precisely the way he does her. He thinks of nights of just this pattern, just this rhythm, making love long and slow and tender, their bodies rocking gently together for hours.

"God, baby," she mutters against his shoulder. "You have no damn idea how fucking hot this is making me."

"Good," he says blurrily, and even he doesn't know whether it's an answer or a comment. This is heat and pleasure and warmth and love and something almost like surrender, but he isn't afraid (surrender has always been his deepest terror: not now.) He feels her mouth against his shoulder, the gentle pressure of her teeth.

"Lemme make love to you," she says, heartfelt need, using the words he knows best and not the ones (he knows) she wants to use: _let me fuck you, baby, I wanna fuck you so bad._ And her hips twitch against his backside as she says it, and oh, he can feel the heat radiating from between her thighs, and he knows it for the same feeling he gets when he needs to be inside her, needs her wrapped around him and both of them drowning in the pleasure.

"Yes," he answers, and he doesn't even have to think about it. He feels the _want_ in her, and he wants to _give._ Whatever she wants. Whatever she needs. And when he does, there will be more of _this,_ because that's the rest of it (shifting, fluid, a continuum of desire and pleasure and fulfillment that dissolves all boundaries.) _He_ wants. And she will give to him.

She laughs softly (he hears joy, and relief, and triumph - not in having won, that's not what this is about, or if it is, it's about having won for _both_ of them, not for herself alone) and kisses his shoulder again. Then she slips her fingers free and clamps her hand firmly around his hip, scissoring herself around and hanging over the side of the bed, draped across his legs as she leans precariously over the side, scrabbling around mysteriously beneath. He hears clattering and rattling, and she giggles (he decides the location of what she so-laughingly calls "the toy box" has been determined - _The American Journal of Archaeology_ will need to be notified) and says "gotcha" and slides herself back up onto the bed again.

And then the moment of awkwardness is past; she's kneeling between his thighs again, telling him what she has in her hand (the object he'd regarded with careful incuriousness, refusing to wonder, the day he'd accidentally seen her collection of sex toys: Polydectes gazing upon the head of Medusa), telling him what she's going to do to him, and how, and what she's going to do to herself. And then she's sliding one end of the double-ended dildo inside herself (it isn't, not _exactly_ , but he'd absolutely refused to allow her to explain its utility to him at the time) and he's imagining the sight of it, the sight of _her_ , and oh, the _noises_ she's making; rough and breathy, the sounds she makes just as she's about to reach climax, and it makes him want…

It makes him _want._

Then there's more warm wetness spreading down over him behind, and his attention is half on that, and half on the sounds she's making, as she settles up on her knees between his legs and rubs against him like she's trying to climb straight inside his skin... And then she's pushing into him again - not her fingers, but an _object_ \- and it's almost something that's wrong, that's too much, but she's stroking his back, his hip, and she's still making those sounds (oh, god, the _sounds_ ) and they pull at him as if they're her hands, and he spreads his legs wider, pushing back, rocking back, feeling it slide in and it shouldn't feel this good, and it's in Cammie (it's in him), binding them together in a new (unimagined) way and she does ... something ... and she moans, deep and free, clutching at his hip, rocking into him, and he lets go of 'shouldn't.' He gasps as he pushes back, but it isn't even unfamiliar now. It's only new.

And she's careful, she's being so careful, coming to rest with her forehead leaning against the spot between his shoulder blades, panting against his skin, but her hips are rocking against him anyway, tiny minute adjustments as if she can't help herself. "You good, baby?" she's asking, and her voice seems to come to him from a long way away. "God, baby, so good, so fucking _good,_ you with me?" And her voice is breathless and ragged, as if she's holding onto control so fiercely, with such determination, wanting to make this _so good_ for him, and that just adds another layer of sensation - physical, emotional - to an experience so intense he already has no referents for it. Her care for his pleasure, her delight in his responses, is so profound, so absolute, that it makes him suddenly determined that if she's getting pleasure from his pleasure, if this is what she wants, he'll give it to her.

Truth.

"Yess-s-s-s," he says, hissed out, and his hands clench on the sheets and his hips rise to meet hers. "Cammie-"

"Oh baby boy," she answers (the secret uncensored love-words she so rarely lets him hear even in bed), and before she can hear what she's said he pushes back against her harder than before, and it's a gift to both of them.

"Yes," he says again, and: "Please," and: "Come on."

She can't hurt him. She _won't_ hurt him. Nothing she does would hurt him (it's her, it's Cammie), and he wants to give (he wants to take.) He wants this - what they're doing together, here in this bed - as much as she does, and he wants it for her, and he wants it for himself.

She can feel that. He can tell she can feel that. As if communication - information - is a thing that passes directly from skin to skin, something carried on wordless breath. "Ah, god, Daniel, baby, _yes,_ " she says, rocking into him, and he feels her _strength,_ and he feels ... lust and humility and tenderness and awe.

 _"Fuck,"_ he gasps. "Cammie. Come on. Come on." He's not even quite sure what he's asking for. But he wants it. Now.

And she gasps something inarticulate, unformed, against his back, and it turns into a growl halfway through, and then she's moving, her hips thrusting circles against him. It's so much, so _good,_ and he finds that his hands have come up to press against the headboard, giving him leverage to meet her, thrust for thrust, and - is this what it's like for her, when he's inside of her? Is this why she always seems as though she's trying to rise off the bed against him, to reach up and grasp at - something, something he can't even define?

"Baby," she's saying, "baby, God, fuck, yes, you," strings of words that make little sense when put together but each of them alone is exactly what he needs to hear. He can feel her climax, signified by sound and shudder and a sudden break in the rhythm she was seeking, while she curls her spine and rubs her breasts over his back.

And he's glad for her, he loves hearing and feeling and sensing her pleasure, but he _wants,_ and when she stirs after a second and slaps him on the flank, whispers "up on your knees, baby, gimme room to fuck you good," the shiver stretches down his spine all the way to his toes.

She lifts herself away from his back and he pulls himself up to hands and knees, spreading his knees wide, bracing himself, feeling the heat of Cammie's body on his back, his buttocks, on the backs of his thighs as she kneels. She must be kneeling, but he can't know for sure; his eyes are closed, his entire attention focused inward now on _wanting._ When he moves, the dildo moves with him; she has her hand on it, letting the movement of his body rock it gently, but when he stops, she slides it deep. "Good?" she asks, and her voice is husky.

All he does is growl, dropping to his forearms and rubbing his face against the sheet. He hadn't thought it was humanly possible, but he's already hard again. He needs this from her; this is no longer a conditional transaction (inside, where Cammie cannot hear): it is about him and what he wants (needs.) She runs the palm of her free hand up the underside of his cock and twists the dildo as she slides it out again.

"Yeah, baby, come on, like that, do it for me," she says.

He's holding on to her voice like a guide-rope across an abyss of possibility; his hips rock back in time to the rhythm of her thrusts - fucking, they're fucking, she's fucking him - and it's beautiful, it's intense. Nothing uncertain, nothing tentative; he's gasping and shuddering, on the edge of coming, because she's fucking him (making love to him) the way he does to her - as if each time, any time, may be the last. He hears himself answering her (the encouragement and love-words and obscenities) with gasped out words and phrases whose meaning slips from his mind even as the words are uttered. All of them mean the same thing. _More. Now. Please._

He pushes up off his forearms as he feels the irresistible kindling of orgasm, back arching with the atavistic need to thrust, to enter, to fill. Cammie's hand lifts from his thigh to circle his cock, squeezing and pulling.

Her hand is firm and warm and - "fuck you _good_ " - she growls, and the huskiness in her voice is heat and sex and he cries out, rising voiceless sounds, and orgasm seems to come from everywhere at once, racing over his skin and through his muscles like sudden heat, and the air is filled with the scent of his come and her hand is slick and wet on his cock and he drops his elbows back to the mattress again, drops his forehead to the bed, cradles his skull in his trembling hands, pressing the heels of his hands against his eyes, gasping, riding it out.

And then she leans forward, kissing him in the small of back, releasing his cock with one last caress, and then gently easing her toy out of his ass. He slides flat, ignoring the wet spot in the sheets. One of Cammie's favorite sayings is that sex is _always_ messy if you do it right.

A moment later she wraps herself around him, kissing his neck, his ear, the side of his face, in heated affection. He turns his face toward her. He's so relaxed that he feels as if he's floating, and the aftershocks of orgasm are still rocking through him in tidal crests and troughs. They make him catch his breath as she muscles him onto his side, putting her arms around him and turning him so she can go on kissing him: cheeks, forehead, eyelids, mouth.

"Beautiful," she says against his lips. "So goddamned beautiful."

He drops his head against her shoulder, inhaling her scent. Sweat and woman and something particularly Cammie. And he's been a prize, a spoil of war, knowing what it is to be valued as nothing more than an ornament, a trophy. Not what she means. He knows that. He nuzzles at the skin beneath his lips.

"Gonna hav't' get you cleaned up," she says, hooking a heel over his thigh to snuggle close. "Not right now. In a while."

This is his love. This is his life. He drifts at the twilight edge of consciousness, barely conscious of holding onto her (arms and legs tangled together, damp heated skin and breathing he only registers because he is lying against the quiet even rise and fall of her chest), and after some unmetered time, his internal monologist tiptoes quietly back to its lectern, to whisper that there have been many things in his life that have been unfair and many things that were undeserved, and it's only statistically-inevitable that some things should be good. Because he doesn't deserve Cammie's presence in his life and if she'd merely treated him with fairness, she'd have left long ago. Long before.

But she stayed.

He's known her over three years. Over a thousand days. Giving him (at a conservative estimate), approximately nine-hundred separate occasions upon which he's made some private vow to stop doing something with regard to her, all of them - actually - involving mistreating her in some fashion, whether acts of commission (vilifying her at the top of his lungs) or acts of omission (refusing to be civil to her at all.) And they've both decided that keeping those vows are beyond him, really (though he does try) but there's something else he's done, and it's time to stop.

It's time to stop thinking she'll go away.

There is nothing short of death that will make her go away, and it's one thing to entertain that notion as a working hypothesis, and another thing entirely to really believe it. He's ready to believe it now. Another private vow. But this one he thinks he'll keep.

#


End file.
